Current Exhibition-
Martha McDonald: The Wood is Singing in Color
September 14, 2023 – December 30, 2023
This fall, WEM’s 2023 Artist-in-Residence Martha McDonald will stage a new live performance, The Wood is Singing in Color, based on her deep research into the museum’s collections and archives. Over the past eight months, McDonald has brought her singular interdisciplinary approach, which creatively responds to collections and histories, to our site. The Wood is Singing in Color marks the first time WEM’s Artist-in-Residence program has culminated in a live performance. The piece will be staged eight times over a series of two weekends in the 1956 Workshop designed by Esherick, Louis I. Kahn, and Anne Tyng.
Photograph by Brooke Sietinsons
Call for Entries-
30th Annual Juried Woodworking Exhibition
THEME: Rhythms
DEADLINE: January 5, 2024
For the Wharton Esherick Museum’s 30th Annual Juried Woodworking Exhibition, we invite you to think about the rhythms that shape your creative practice. How do the rhythms of life – whether the daily movements, from waking to sleep, or the larger rhythms of shifting seasons or other cycles – show up in your work? Does making artwork help you capture rhythms, or keep you “on time”? Are there specific rhythms that you center in your creative work? What visual or material rhythms speak loudest through the works you create? We encourage applicants to think about this idea broadly, and hope you’ll submit entries across the spectrum of approaches to this theme, from literal to interpretive. The competition is open to both emerging and established makers across all artistic disciplines, so long as wood is part of the finished piece.
“If it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing” –Wharton Esherick
The Wharton Esherick Museum celebrates and preserves the legacy of American artist Wharton Esherick, who worked primarily in wood to create furniture, furnishings, utensils, interiors, buildings and more.
A National Historic Landmark for Architecture, his hilltop studio/residence, with more than 300 of his works on exhibition, has been preserved much as it was when the artist lived and worked there.
We invite you to visit the Museum through a guided experience for which reservations are required.
Watch Craft in America episode, HOME, featuring the Wharton Esherick Museum
HOME visits artists whose environments are filled with meaning and metaphor. It features Syd Carpenter, Helen Drutt, Wharton Esherick, Biskakone Greg Johnson, North House Folk School, and Sim Van de Ryn.
Stream the episode online here!
Watch our Spotlight Talk: Filming with Craft in America
“A complete expression of one man’s intensely personal fusion of fine craftsmanship with the wild flights of the imagination.”
“Fun, neat, creative, colorful, comfortable, smooth, flowing, exciting, cool, twisty, wavy, and extraordinary.”
